Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

energies were divided between that, the hopelessly earnest Community Memorymeetings, and monthly Homebrew meetings, which he still proudly moderated.The club was famous now that microcomputers were being acclaimed as the chiefgrowth industry of the country. And the prime example of this was AppleComputer, which would gross $139 million in 1980, the year it went public,making Jobs and Wozniak worth a combined sum of well over $300 million.Croesus Mode.That was the year that Lee Felsenstein ran into Adam Osbome at the ComputerFaire. Jim Warren's show was now an annual event pulling in fifty thousandpeople in a weekend. Osbome was a trim, Bangkok-born Englishman in his fortieswith a thin brown moustache and an imperious vanity which propelled his columnin trade magazines (entitled "From the Fountainhead") to notoriety. A formerengineer, he made a fortune publishing books on microcomputers when no oneelse was. He would sometimes bring boxes of them to Homebrew meetings and gohome with empty boxes and wads of cash. His books eventually sold hundreds ofthousands, McGraw-Hill bought his publishing house, and now, "with the moneyburning a hole in my pocket," as he said, he was looking to go into themanufacture of computers.Osbome's theory was that all the current products were too much oriented towardhackers. He did not believe that people cared to know about the magic that hackersfound within computers. He had no sympathy for people who wanted to know howthings worked, people who wanted to explore things, people who wanted toimprove the systems they studied and dreamed about. In Adam Osbome's view,there was nothing to be gained by spreading the Hacker Ethic; computers were forsimple applications, like word processing or financial calculation. His idea was toprovide a no-frills computer which would come with all you needed to get goingOsborne thought people were happiest when relieved of anxiety-producingchoices, like which word-processing program to buy. It would be cheap, and smallenough to carry on a plane. A portable Volkscomputer. He asked Lee Felsensteinto design it. Because the machine he wanted need only be "adequate," designing itshould not be too hard a task. "Five thousand people on the peninsula could havedone it," Osbome later said. "I happened to know Lee."So for twenty-five percent of this as yet unformed company, Lee Felsensteindesigned the machine. He chose to interpret Osborne's requirement that themachine be "adequate" to mean he could do his usual job of junkyard engineering,making sure that the design was solid enough to support well-tested components inan architecture that eschewed tricks and detours. "To be able to make a design thatis good and adequate, works well, and is buildable and cheap and contains nothingfancy is an artistic problem," he later said. "I had to be crazy enough and brokeenough [to try it]." But Lee knew that he could fulfill the requirements. As usual,